In Their Own Words
Part 1: For No Good Reason
“The Biggest Gang Here in New York City”: From Serve and Protect to Patrol and Control
Note: PROP originally published this report in May 2013. It is available in .pdf format from the PROP website. PROP is republishing it here in multiple parts to make its content more widely available and in the hope of spreading its findings and message. This report is even more relevant in light of continued public protests and discourse on biased policing practices in NYC and the United States.
Introduction: Quotes and Quotas
This document presents quotes from New Yorkers throughout our city who all too often experience and endure disrespect and abuse at the hands of NYPD officers. Interested and informed persons are familiar with the statistical evidence of the NYPD’s misguided and racially biased tactics. This report seeks to put flesh and blood on the bones of these numbers, to present the terrible human consequences of stop and frisk and other objectionable NYPD practices, and to show the very real ways these law enforcement approaches hurt and severely compromise the lives and well-being of people and communities.
These quotes also provide hard evidence, in the words of NYPD victims, of the illegal tactics and racially biased attitudes endemic in the daily operations of the Department. It is PROP’s view, and the view of other informed observers, that a principal source of these problems is the NYPD’s utilization of an aggressively enforced quota system to evaluate the performance of officers on the street.
The NYPD’s “productivity goals” are a thinly veiled euphemism for a quota system. Department officials use the term to explain the pressure placed on street cops to make a required number of arrests or to hand out a sufficient number of summonses. Quotas are illegal under a state law, which, over seven years ago, a state arbitrator found that the NYPD had violated.1 When a representative of the Department, a precinct captain or lieutenant, directs officers to meet specific numerical goals regarding arrests and summonses, then deploys the officers in particular neighborhoods, everyone in those neighborhoods becomes a potential criminal, even if their criminality is fabricated to meet monthly “productivity goals.” The subsequent indiscriminate ticketing, false arrests, illegal stop and frisks, and other harassment techniques undermine officers’ relationship with communities and result in unfair and counterproductive policing. As the quotes contained in this report attest, many community members no longer feel they can turn to the police as a source of protection. In fact, they often feel they must take steps to protect themselves from the police, and lose faith in a legal system that unjustly targets and punishes them at its earliest stages and with its most public arm.
Our concern is not with the proverbial “few bad apples,” a dubious response that Department defenders often put forward when police wrongdoing is exposed. It is an argument that belies a substantial body of evidence, including what the quotes presented herein inform us about the day-to-day practices of the NYPD. Our concern is that these illegal and biased tactics employed by street cops reflect a system-wide attitude and culture. Our concern, too, is that these bad practices mainly target marginalized groups: black and brown young men, people from low-income areas, sex workers, LGBT persons, mentally ill people, street vendors, and the homeless. It is our hope, with this document and other reports, to address these systemic failures directly. As a start, the City’s policy makers should abolish the quota system, the application of so-called productivity goals, which robs street officers of individual discretion and drives many of the current everyday NYPD practices that inflict harm and hardship on so many New York City residents.
For No Good Reason
“You can be sitting outside enjoying a nice day and the officers will come up and ask you for your ID.” Jacqueline Yates, Bronx mother.2
“In the summertime, it’s nice outside. Why can’t I hang out in front of my building? [The NYPD] give you a ticket for trespassing ’cause you’re sitting on the bench that’s in front of your building. I can’t sit on the bench in front of my building? Why’s the bench there?” Anthony T.3
“You know how many times they tell us to move from a table when we’re here playing cards or dominoes? It shouldn’t be like this.” Kim Gregory, Bronx resident.4
“There’s too much harassment out here, you can’t do nothin’. Nothin’. Can’t come to the park, can’t go to the store. I go to meet my grandmother at 155th train station, they’re asking me questions, ‘Where you goin’? What you doin’? You look suspicious.’ No, I’m lookin’ like I’m looking for my grandmother.” Bronx resident.5
“I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched police throw my son and his friends up against a wall. Anywhere my son goes — the lobby, the courtyard, the stairwell — he can be stopped and harassed by the NYPD. A trip to the store can result in a weekend in jail for him.” Fawn Bracy, Bronx mother.6
“You know it’s excessive when you see people get stopped who really don’t deserve to be stopped, like kids going to school. The police just jump out, stop them, search them, take their names down, then get back in their car and leave, and the kids don’t know what went on.” James Westcott, Bronx resident.7
“I feel like we’re not in a free country when you can’t walk down the street. You got to be questioned about where you’re going and what you’re doing.” Laverne I.8
“I was stopped and frisked on the day of my graduation. I was going to receive my masters of divinity. The same day I was stopped by the police officer. So, those two things are really going to be embedded in my mind for the rest of my life. I got my degree and I got a frisk — just to remind me who I was.”
Rev. Al Taylor, community leader.9
“If you’re African American, walking the streets at night anytime, I guess, after six, seven o’clock, you’re more than likely to get stopped for no apparent reason… and be harassed and sometimes even incarcerated for no apparent reason.” New Yorker.10
“The police do what they want… If I went to court to sue, what do you think would happen? Things would just get worse.” Mousa Ahmad, an Arab-American who was forced to close his café after NYPD surveillance drove away customers.11
“I told the DA that I didn’t spit, so they said, ‘So, you have a choice. You’re gonna pay this fine or you’re gonna go to trial.’ I said, ‘I’m not gonna pay a fine for something I didn’t do, so let’s go to trial.’ So, I’m actually going to trial for spitting, and I think that’s the most absurd thing I ever heard of in my life.” Andre, South Bronx resident, who was falsely accused of spitting by the NYPD.12
“When you’re a street vendor in New York, every single day it’s a different fight. Vendors like us, we start out with nothing and work hard for our families. We are committing no crime. We don’t think it’s a crime to work in New York.” Alberto Loera, who sued the city for excessive ticketing of his food truck.13
“It’s kinda crazy out here how cops target us and they think just because we live in a community like this, we’re ignorant… We treat them with respect, why we can’t get the same respect back?” New Yorker.14
“My son plays basketball, he’s a student in Howard University, comes home and he’s stopped and frisked for no apparent reason… They went through his gym bag — because he lives in public housing, or because he’s Black… Professionalism? Courtesy? Respect? None of the above.” Tracy, Brooklyn mother.15
“The sheer number of stops is actually ostracizing a huge number of people who live in these communities that are impacted by crime. It doesn’t make sense that you’re spending so many man hours, so much energy and resources, to stop so many innocent people and end up with very little output. The number of guns that they found from the stops is extremely small. So it just doesn’t seem effective.” Joey M.16
“The police will approach you for anything. They got a bunch of stories. They here Tuesdays and Thursdays, on a regular basis, and they try to find everything they need to do to make a bust.” Muneebah, Bronx mother, describes sweeps of young neighborhood men.17
“They was on the corner of 112th, a lot of boys standing there. And the officer asked them to move, but they didn’t move fast enough. They put them all up against the gate and frisked them. They didn’t find anything. But they did frisk them, for no reason at all. For no reason at all.” Marie, describing multiple incidents of NYPD stopping her son in East Harlem.18
“[The cops] told us to stand up take off our shoes, socks, hoodies, and told everybody to take their top shirt off and leave only their undershirt or one shirt on. They told us to unbutton our pants and roll the waistband down. Three of us were in pajamas. They made us stand and wait with backs turned until a female officer came. She turned us around by our necks and frisked us. They were looking for weed. They found nothing, but took us to the precinct anyway, where our mother had to come get us.” Brianna E., who was stopped by NYPD officers in her building with her siblings and cousins, ages 8–16.19
“We were standing in front of a hospital. It was obvious that I was, for lack of better words, delusional. And [the cops’] response was to arrest me — without reading me my rights — rather than taking me into the emergency room to seek treatment. They decided to take me to the precinct.” Michelle Benfield, on the NYPD’s inappropriate response to mental illness.20
“It’s like [being stopped and frisked] is something we have to get used to, you know, almost like it’s a rite of passage. And it’s devastating.” Nicholas Peart, Harlem Resident.21
You can read this report in full, and many others, on PROP’s website.
